In El orden del caos Francisco Collado engages in the difficult task of finding an underlying order behind the apparent chaos and paranoia of Pynchon's literary universe. Regardless of the fact that, as a militant postmodernist, Pynchon himself might find such a mission objectionable, Collado's study overtly sets out on a literary-critical quest: a search for what the critic terms "una comprensión totalizadora del universo literario de Thomas Pynchon." If the paranoiac quest for elusive meaning is a central motif in most of Pynchon's works, Collado's volume reads as one more quest, albeit a literary-critical and fully successful one. Despite the inherent difficulty of any attempt to search for wholeness and meaning in the writings of an author celebrated for championing unchecked undecidability, Collado explicitly posits the thesis that Pynchon's works present a chaotic universe which hides a "subterranean" order.